Sunday, July 15, 2012

Ediment: The Boar King by Michael Evans

Dear Readers,

there are full novels, super novellas, novellas and short stories. And with the entrance of digital books (I prefer the term eBook) we got a new category: A series which means several books broken down to named chapters and sold as single books. Sounds complicated? Let me give you an example. Take the A Song of Ice and Fire series, cut the books into peaces chapterwise and sell each chapter as a single book.
Don't get me wrong. I have nothing against it. It is just a question of taste.

The reason why I opened this Ediment (my term for a short review) with the explanation above, is the book I review today.
Before I go into details let me thank author Michael Evans for sending me a digital review copy of The Boar King (The Battle Lord, Chapter 1) [Amazon Kindle ASIN:B008DC4R7Y].

EDIMENT

The Boar King (The Battle Lord, Chapter 1)

[Amazon Kindle ASIN:B008DC4R7Y]

by Michael Evans

As described in the book title, The Boar King is the Chapter 1 in the epic fantasy series The Battle Lord.
The 29 pages of The Boar King are divided into ten named chapters where the chapter header reflects in a short term what happens within the chapter.

The story and the ingredients are nothing new under the epic fantasy sun. It is a good vs evil story which takes you in a quick ride from the planning of coming into power until the success of the plan with the outlook of revenge and a brotherly love and hate story.

The battle and fights are intense and garnered with magic. The dialogue is not too complicated and the used vocabulary delivers an easy read. The story goes on at a good pace. It is even possible to develop a kind of sympathy for some of the characters . It is not astonishing that the description of landscape, history and so on is limited to a minimum. But there is still enough to deliver basic information regarding the descriptions.

All in all a fast read with a lot of action which I finished in around 45 minutes.

I like epic (and I mean really epic with several books a many pages) fantasy.
Regarding my reading habits, my taste and my imagination of epic fantasy I must say The Boar King (The Battle Lord, Chapter 1) is nothing for me. It is something that I would call epic fantasy light. That has nothing to do with the content and the writing itself.

If you do not like books like bricks, if you like straight forward story telling with a lot of action and battles including magic, if your attention span is short, if you do not want to be bothered with detailed descriptions of landscape, history, sociology, relationships, political system, economy and more then The Boar King (The Battle Lord, Chapter 1) delivers exactly the kind of epic fantasy you want.

I'm sure the The Battle Lord series will find its readership as the reviews at Amazon.com show.
I will read other books instead.

2 comments:

I'm not against the short stories or the thin books or booklets (for example Sherlock Holmes stories, anthologies, etc.), but I prefer the big, thick brick-like books.

A thick tome means challenge and show some kind of respect. But the content is these books are really matter. I so disappointed, when I hold a thick book in my hand at a bookstore and after I look into it see the frames, fonts and spaces are bigger than usual.